The research work of the working group focuses on questions of social relations with nature and sustainable development, which we examine from the perspective of an integrative, non-dualistic human-world research (Steiner 2014). According to this approach, truth, theory and practice must be understood as a unity mediated in experience, whereby the classical, dichotomous division between socio-cultural and material proves to be invalid. Instead, the human being and the environment are understood as a holistic and permanently dynamically changing unity of the physical-material, the corporeal, the cognitive, the emotional, the psychological and the social. In it, stability can only exist temporarily, since individual events entail a reflexive change of the whole. A stability- or equilibrium-oriented, anthropocentric concept of the environment is replaced by the idea of a milieu that is processually interwoven with the human being, in which and through which the human being co-exists alongside the other elements of his or her world. The environment becomes a permanently changing holistically conceived co-world.

Such a changed perspective speaks conceptually for an equal unity of human beings and the co-world and thus offers a reason for a changed ethical and practical approach of human beings to their co-world, in which perspectives of sustainable development take on a special significance.

Since, according to this approach, co-worlds are immanently characterised by change, human activity in this world is always marked by a (residual) uncertainty regarding its effects. In scientific practice, we therefore pursue the overarching question in a process-oriented perspective of how people deal creatively and transactively with permanently changing living conditions in their (non-)human co-world and the uncertainties associated with them, and how they repeatedly find new ways of solving the problems they face - be it in their economic activities, the "practicing place" against the background of complex social natural conditions or the political economy of sustainable urban and tourism development (see Fig. 1). Depending on the cognitive interest, the focus is on different types of human transaction with our co-worlds - from the individual bodily experiences and practices of individuals to the social and normative power relations to which they are exposed, which they help to shape and with which they shape their world.

In this regard, references to pragmatic geography, political ecology and more-than-human geographies form the conceptual anchors of the research group's investigation of the dynamically changing practices by which spaces and places are produced and constantly reconfigured. The empirical research of the working group can be assigned to three thematic-conceptual pillars:

The first pillar, building on impulses from pragmatic transaction theory and more-than-human geographies*, is research on human-nature geographies. The focus is on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research on human-wildlife conflicts (wolf, beaver, etc.).

The second pillar of research builds bridges from social-geographical human-environment research to geographical development, urban and tourism research and asks about the practicing place of social nature relations and sustainable development in different social arenas.

Inspired by the Social Studies of Economisation, the third pillar of our work deals with the quality of goods. Following a pragmatic-process-oriented perspective, we understand quality not as something inherent to goods, but as the result of controversial and dynamically changing processes of qualification. We understand these processes as always locally and regionally embedded in social relations and institutional contexts, but at the same time also integrated in global networks of relations. Therefore, we speak of geographies of qualification. Within the framework of our analysis, we place special focus on the located and locating practices of qualification.

See also research database: KU.fordoc

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